A Miscalculation (2)
Three reserve hunters, locked in a standoff against a single Blood Howler.
Reserve hunters in name only — in truth, each of them was already every bit the hunter a professional would be. A Blood Howler was not a monster that three beginner-level hunters could bring down easily.
"Whew… huuuh…."
"Haah… haaah…."
That said, Choi Marie and Han Sora looked thoroughly exhausted. Of course they were, considering how much mana they'd burned through over the course of the fight.
Two more shots, give or take. That's all Choi Marie has left. Same for Han Sora.
Blocking an attack or two with her shield, or loosing an arrow or two with careful precision — that was roughly the extent of the mana they had remaining, plain to see. Which meant this was the crux of the 'Choi Marie event' from the original novel.
…And if she acted exactly as she had in the original, things couldn't play out more perfectly for me.
-Piiiing!!
Auuugh….
Along with the twang of Han Sora's bowstring, another arrow buried itself in the Blood Howler's leg.
More than a dozen arrows were already bristling from every part of its body — every one of them loosed by Han Sora as the battle dragged on.
And now, just one more shot would put it down. Its condition was at its limit — you could feel it in your gut.
-Bang, taaang!!
Just follow the plan, and it's perfect.
With its aggro target changed, the beast would lunge at Han Sora; I'd fire one more shot to pull its attention back. Choi Marie would spend her remaining mana to block one more attack, and then Han Sora would finish it.
It had been a grueling, razor-thin fight, but these three were more than capable of pulling it off.
"Hah… it's almost over, Marie-sunbae. The next arrow will definitely kill it."
"…Whew… huuuh…."
"You just have to block one more time. This one last block, and the monster wave is finished."
Take down the boss monster, and it's over. The broken dungeon gate would dissolve, and no more monsters would pour out.
Whatever had already emerged wouldn't simply vanish, of course. But the few that had slipped out were being treated as little more than a minor pest problem — mopped up one by one. In practice, the only real threat left was the single Blood Howler in front of us.
"Sunbae, where do you think it'll jump this time? From its movement pattern so far, I'd say it steps left about two paces before…"
"Whew… hoo… huuuh…."
"…Marie-sunbae?"
She didn't properly answer my question. Her entire focus was fixed on the Blood Howler charging straight at us.
-Taaaak!!
…And then her body launched itself forward, straight toward the monster head-on.
"Ma-Marie-sunbae?!"
"Choi Marie-sunbae!!"
…Honestly. Seriously.
By the time Han Sora and I called her name, it was too late — the girl who'd already launched herself had no intention of looking back.
That was Choi Marie for you: recklessly charging in on nothing but faith in whatever 'correct answer' she'd conjured in her own head.
Honestly, I never saw this coming.
Who charges at a monster in this situation, leaving behind her Support Department junior — me, of all people? She could see exactly what would happen to me without her there to protect me, couldn't she?
And the favorability I'd built with her today alone was no small amount. Factoring in the rapport and history we'd accumulated before that, it should have been even greater.
And yet she'd abandoned me and thrown herself at the monster, with my life hanging in the balance.
Really, truly….
I hadn't expected this. Not even I had predicted it would go this far.
…Nor had I ever dreamed things would fall into place this beautifully.
Once she'd decided to act, there would be no retreat. Nothing but charging straight at the monster before her. One chance — a single opportunity — for the shield raise, and a single one for the shield bash.
It was an enemy she could kill, after all. So she'd thrown herself forward on nothing but the single-minded resolve to end it even a second sooner.
-Kaaaaang!!
Kyaaaang!!
Fortunately, the strike didn't miss. She'd been watching it from the very beginning, after all.
What rules governed that monster's movements. What habits betrayed it when it moved. Which parts of its body had taken the most damage.
She'd observed it all, from start to finish.
Reading the situation first and analyzing it fastest — that was the role of a shieldbearer.
-Pasasasak!!
Even as Choi Marie's final blow landed, the steel lid shattered like a piece of rotted wood.
Until now, she had only been barely maintaining its shape by channeling her mana through it. The moment her mana ran dry, its collapse was the natural result.
But it didn't matter. All she had to do was kill this one monster, and this monster wave would be over.
Standing idle on the sidelines, merely watching events play out — that had never suited her. There were times, Choi Marie believed, when you had to throw your own body into the problem to solve it.
-Paak!!
"……Huh?"
The Blood Howler sprang up off the ground and lunged — and her mind simply stopped.
"……Wh-what?!"
No. Why?
Her plan had been flawless. It had to have been.
This wasn't the first time Choi Marie had made a mistake like this. She had a history — the time she'd misjudged the force behind her own attack, thrown out a clumsy strike, and shattered her party's formation entirely.
She had sworn, back then, that she would never repeat the same mistake twice.
Why won't it die? I brought that shield down with everything I had — enough to break it in hal—
And only then did Choi Marie grasp her error.
The shield in her hands had never been her personal issue shield from the Academy. It was a garbage can lid.
No matter how much she reinforced it with mana, the mana consumed in sustaining it meant the strike could never deliver its full force.
This was her first time fighting a monster in direct combat outside the Academy — and so she had, once again, made the wrong call.
"Seonho!!"
"Uwaaaaagh!!"
"…N-no!!"
…The price of her judgment was far, far too great.
"Uwaaaaagh!!"
Even having taken Choi Marie's full-force strike, the Blood Howler scrambled upright and charged at full power toward its final aggro target — me.
I screamed and ran, playing the panicked victim. But in truth, I'd known this would happen from the moment Choi Marie abandoned me and lunged.
Different person, different position — how does she act exactly like she did in the original novel?
So if Choi Marie failed to move like her original-novel self, so be it. We were sunbae-junior at the Academy, with all sorts of history built up between us. Even if she saw an opening with her own eyes, would a shieldbearer really abandon her closest junior — a junior whose physical abilities were woefully inadequate, no less — and charge ahead alone?
If she'd held her ground patiently, I would have had to overhaul my entire training plan for her. The fatal flaw the original her carried as a tank would have been fixed, and there would have been no pretext for her to owe me anything.
But the Choi Marie of this moment was drunk on her own judgment, blind to the actual situation — and the price of that blindness was my life in danger.
If you wanted to be technical about it, this is closer to Han Sora's event.
As I said before — in the original, Seo Woojin stood where Han Sora stands now, and Han Sora stood behind Choi Marie.
And a swordsman like Seo Woojin could easily have covered for Han Sora when the shieldbearer fell and she was thrown into crisis. That's how he'd racked up her favorability in the original.
But in our current situation, forget favorability — could Han Sora, an archer, actually stop that monster as it charged at me?
Probably not.
An attack she absolutely couldn't dodge would be slamming into me. That flicker of I almost died would brush past her, just as it had with the original Han Sora.
And in proportion to the size of that danger, so too would the Debt of Heart Choi Marie owed me grow.
"Seonho!!"
"N-no!!"
Han Sora, desperately training an arrow on the Blood Howler even as she screamed my name. And Choi Marie, crying out as if in despair over her own catastrophic misjudgment.
Under normal circumstances, with an upper-tier monster like a Blood Howler at this range, a Support Department student like me had no way of surviving.
Which was exactly why I'd bought all those emergency supplies at the Firearms Specialty Store today. Say, for example — this stinger grenade.
-Fssssssss!!
"Kghk—khk—kehak…."
Auuugh, aauuugh!!
A support tool that blinded the vision with smoke while simultaneously deadening the sense of smell.
And since the Blood Howler was a canine-type monster, its nose was far sharper than mine. It would hurt that much more.
Kyeheng, kyeng!! Kyaaaaaang!!
"Kghk—kehaaak!!"
The problem was that I'd deployed it at such close range that I caught the full brunt too — but that was a cost I'd simply have to eat. It beat paying with my life, at least.
Besides, every stage of this ordeal would be carved into Choi Marie as an eternally unpayable debt. Showing her my suffering up close was, if anything, the better play.
"Kehak—Han… Sora!! Now, quickly!!"
I begged Han Sora for the finishing blow, coughing and wracked by the smoke (though I genuinely was suffering, too).
I trusted her not to miss — not to put an arrow in me by accident. I knew the exact effect of the Suggestion I'd planted in her.
-Piiiing!!
At last, with a sound of cleaving wind, Han Sora's arrow came cutting through the acrid haze toward me.
Her final arrow grazed past me so close I could feel an actual chill run through me — and then…
-Thuk.
Grrrk….
It punched straight through the Blood Howler's throat, and delivered the beast to its end.
In hunter and hero stories, the police always arrive one beat too late — it's practically a rule. Sure enough, the officers and hunters who'd registered the monster wave showed up several minutes after the fact.
To be fair, the three of us had suppressed the wave almost the instant it began, so by pure timing alone it looked exactly like we'd handled everything before they even arrived.
"You again?"
"It just kind of worked out that way, ma'am."
We'd already crossed paths over the Neverland terror incident, and now here she was, staring at me with open disbelief at finding me tied to a monster wave as well — Police Chief Eun Soyeon.
I wasn't the only one who'd been through both incidents; Han Sora had too. But I was the one who'd taken a statement one-on-one with Chief Eun Soyeon last time.
If a statement had to be taken either way, I'd take Eun Soyeon over some sweaty middle-aged male officer any day.
"…So. When the Blood Howler charged you at the end, you pulled the pin while you were still inside the smoke?"
"Yes. I happened to be on my way back from buying equipment today, so I'd picked one up as a spare."
"Isn't that an idiotic call? Forget the Blood Howler being a canine monster — what made you so sure it would come out of that smoke after you?"
"I trusted Han Sora. In that situation, I knew she'd hit the Blood Howler, not me."
"You gambled your life on a fifty-fifty? First the Jo Jin-hyun encounter, now this — your guts are absurdly oversized, kid."
"Better odds than dying for certain. Besides, Chief, even you couldn't handle a Blood Howler with a civilian body."
Honestly, there were better weapons out there if I'd looked for them. And if I'd simply engineered things so the beast never charged me at all, it would have been safer still.
But this was what the current me needed most. What I wanted was never just the extermination of a single Blood Howler.
"Fine. We may need you for follow-up questions, so head home for today."
"Understood. Until next time, Chief Eun Soyeon."
"Since when did you memorize my name? And don't jinx me by telling a police officer you'll see her again."
"Yes, ma'am."
What can I say, though? We're fated to keep running into each other.
As long as I'm out poaching Seo Woojin's events, Eun Soyeon and I were destined to cross paths every time something like this happened.
Well — more importantly.
Right now, I had someone other than Eun Soyeon to take care of first.
"Seonho, the interview's all done?"
"Yeah. There was a lot to go over because of the Blood Howler, so it took a while."
"……."
"Marie-sunbae, did you wait for me the whole time? Thank you."
"N-no, junior… I was just…."
After all — it was time to begin collecting the 'Debt of Heart' that Choi Marie would owe me for the rest of her life.